The 105-Year-Old Blogger

When I moved to Ottawa in 1981, I liked to ride my bicycle along the Ottawa River . I lived in the west-end suburb of Nepean and rode from Andrew Haydon Park to downtown. I often stopped on a hillside near Woodroffe Beach and enjoyed the view of the Gatineau Hills. Now, married with four grown children, I live in the east-end suburb of Orleans. I like to ride my bicycle along the Ottawa River from Petrie Island to the Aviation Museum . I often stop on a hillside at the mouth of Green’s Creek and enjoy the view of the Gatineau Hills.   This is where 30 years has taken me: 25 Kilometres down the Ottawa river.   I loved Montreal, and I loved living at home. I would have stayed. But I wanted to learn a trade, and I was too insecure in my language skills to attend a French cooking school. The Baking Techniques course at Algonquin College in Ottawa was only one year long. Moving to another city was an exciting idea, as long as it wasn’t too far from home. And Ottawa had a...

In a blog about Canada, there has to be at least one post with this title.   Cold is the dominant theme this winter.   There was a day in December 2013 when it was colder in Winnipeg than on Mars.   By Christmas 2013, we in Ottawa had already had a nasty cold snap, and the snowbanks were already up to our waists.   My husband calls this an “old-fashioned winter.”   It’s very telling that full-on winter by Christmas is considered a thing of the past. During the winter of 1975/1976, my two sisters and I were all in high school together.   A mere three or four years previous to that, our teachers had pulled the rug out from under our elementary school education by eliminating everything we had been taught about pounds and ounces, feet and inches, and Fahrenheit.  In  1975, metric became the officially-used measurement system in Canada .   Those of us who had not been learning metric since Kindergarten were given lots of help.   The...

Salle de la Reformation. The official opening of the League of Nations.  Photo obtained on Wikimedia Commons: “ This file is a digital replica of a document or a part of a document available at the National Library of Norway under the URN  no-nb_nansen_2488 . ” The new League of Nations held its first General Assembly in Geneva on November 15, 1920.   My great uncle Loring Christie was there as part of the Canadian delegation , and wrote about it in letters to his parents.   Below are some excerpts, written in December, 1920. "I am writing this in the Assembly Hall & I hope you will forgive the pencil.   The speeches are not very inspiring this morning and I seize the moment to send love & Christmas greetings … The Assembly has now been going since Nov. 15; people are getting fed up & tired of each other; there is a general determination to bring the thing to an end, and I think it certain that we shall be through by the end of next wee...

Image by  Gordon Johnson  from  Pixabay My great uncle Loring Christie   was a Canadian delegate to the ParisPeace Conference of 1919 .   In those days, Canada’s presence was as part of the entity of the British Empire, rather than as its own country.   When Loring says “our people”, he’s really talking about that entity.   The Peace Conference was the beginning of a change in that status .   This is an excerpt from a February 1919 letter that Loring wrote to his parents:   “The Preliminary Peace Conference -- that is the proper name of what is going on now -- is getting some things done, but very slowly -- too slowly to suit my feelings about the matter. The world outside is in too precarious a condition to trifle with. Of course the task is almost staggering.   And if the time seems long, one has to remember the great difficulties of reaching agreement among so many Governments, so many peoples, with differences of language, cust...

“Big Canadian Stuff” could refer to the large fun things that we like to build in our towns; like turtles , lobsters and potatoes . But there’s no need for me to do this since Canadian author Will Ferguson has done a perfect job already in the article “Wawa to Black Diamond: A Cross-Canada Tour of Big-Assed Objects by the Side of the Road”, in his book Canadian Pie.   I’m content to have forced my son to accomplish that Canadian rite of passage: getting your picture taken with the Wawa goose.    My “Big Canadian Stuff” has to do with industry; the kind of thing I notice only thanks to friends and family.   My childhood would have been one endless daydream—paddling contentedly in the Seaway pool in St. Lambert near Montreal, watching giant ships go by without ever wondering where they came from—were it not for my parents’ expeditions to the St. Lambert Locks.   These were the first on the Seaway , and we went there for no better reason than to watch a bi...

On a brutally hot Montreal summer morning in 1975, my Dad, siblings, and I rode our bicycles by bridges and backways into downtown Montreal, and left them at the railway station.   They, along with us (and Mom), were to board the train that night and head west.   A trip diary written by a 13-year-old reliably reports the important things; my diary chronicles the fact that, after checking our bikes onto the train, “Dad treated us to an orange drink or milkshake.”   It also declares the weather for the next three days “air-conditioned.” Overnighting in coach seats is a great adventure when travelling the short distance to Nova Scotia.   Four nights of it would have been onerous.   Roomettes or berths for everyone were too expensive, so my parents booked two coach seats, two roomettes, and two berths, and we all took turns using them.   That, at least, had been the theory.   “Took turns” quickly settled into sharing.   My sisters and I easily f...

Whenever my parents took the family to our relatives’ exquisite cottage in Tidnish, near Amherst , Nova Scotia, we travelled by overnight train.   Boarding right at our Montreal suburb in the evening, we arrived in Amherst the following afternoon.   It was always a fun train ride, and we could count on three things happening sometime during the trip: a crying baby, a loud talker, and a drunk.   In the summer of 1973, a rail strike forced us to travel home a different way.   We discovered that what the Greyhound lacked in drunks and babies, it made up for in pot-smokers. Strikes are a common feature of our western culture, so there’s nothing unique about that aspect of my Montreal childhood.   Teachers’ strikes were frequent and welcome.   When I could stay home and read my books, instead of sitting in a classroom surrounded by a bewildering array of subjects and socializing, I was just as happy.   My education wasn’t affected by the strikes, and...